User blog:ThisWriter/Going beyond the Bocks
No, this is not about contradicting my previous blog on this topic. Instead I'll try to explain and make some things clearer. There are lots of ways to go beyond the Box but one way is not like the others. Background When I came to this community I was interested in posting my world-building experiments and was looking for what would be mainly a world-building community interested in exploring the cosmological scales. That is why I stayed on this community, it looked to be exactly that. I'm much more interested in that fictional part of the wiki than on the geometry information, although its all interested and the topics are still things I do enjoy. They just are not the reason why I came and not my focus while I'm here either. World building So, I'm here with a mindset of world building and when I talk about these things or enter a discussion on this community I'm doing it with the mindset of a world builder or in the context of world building. In world building, specifically in the part of describing the "terrain" so to speak, building the places where things exist, the locations, etc, one of the major aspects of that is defining where those places are in relation to each other. The same thing applies at the scales we deal with in this community. When we build several universes we need to spatially relate them to each other so that in a story we know how to move a character from one to another if needed. Where does a character that gets out of their universe end up? These are questions about the terrain of the setting. How do the universes relate? Where do they exist in or what are they inside of? The question continues to apply at levels higher than universes and multiverses, to whatever extent we desire or need them to. Its about containment This is a statement I've made in several discussions about these topics. Cosmologies on this wiki, so far, are fundamentally about containment. Even when they talk about size or other things, they are still fundamentally about containment. The fundamental property of a structure of some level is that it defines the space for the structures of the lower level to exist inside. It contains those structures of the lower level. Going from this to talking about size or comparing them by size is only normal because it is more natural and common to talk about size than containment. And it is only natural to assume that something which contains something else obviously needs to be larger than what it contains. This would seem to be logical except that things presented on this wiki and in the contexts we deal with here, logic is usually left behind at some point as we move beyond it past a certain level where contradictions start to appear and be embraced by the hierarchies. This is a fact that we must deal with when talking about absolutes, infinities and things past infinities in many ways; when talking about conceptual things and things that are beyond conceptual; and when talking about things that do not exist, are not real, impossible things that maybe cannot even be imagined, etc. Once contradictions are embraced, or even just accepted, having something contain some other thing of equal or even larger size is just one more of such contradictions. So size stops mattering at this point, if not much before. If one wishes to have the cosmology be absolute, at some level, even containment needs to become paradoxical or contradictory in nature. Things that contain that which is not contained, things that contain whatever contains them and even things that contain themselves are just some of the paradoxical consequences of taking this exercises to such extremes. If one accepts paradoxes, they are just another of those and perfectly ok. So why containment? If containment is as much paradoxical as size or any other property actually, why is containment special? Its just that containment is the fundamental property that helps defining the geographical relationships between these structures to provide a framework to have stories happen inside. It allows us to know where does a character end up when they break out of their universe. That is what is fundamental for world building. Philosophy Philosophically speaking, there is no difference between a hierarchy about containment and a hierarchy about anything else. Any other property can be used as a basis to make a cosmological hierarchy and it will also be a valid hierarchy. It can even be more useful for some other things. I never debated against this. I even created some of those on the wiki on the Universe Classification pages. I imagine that characters existing inside the worlds we invent would also come up and debate their own classifications, either philosophically or in the name of science. I greatly enjoy philosophical debate. My problems with these classifications where never the classifications themselves but more a shock of contexts. As I said before, I've came to this community, and I am in this community, under a context and mindset of world building. So it is not surprising that there is shock when confronted with someone who is on a mindset of philosophical debate, especially when the different contexts are not apparent as such. Now that the contexts have been made apparent, I expect that such shock will disappear. Going beyond the Box So, it is possible to go beyond the Box after all? Well, yes and no. I do stand by my position that the Box cannot be surpassed, but I am obviously debating a hierarchy based on containment when I make such a claim. I'm firmly on a mindset of world building in there. I'm saying that, if one accepts the existence of the Box as written on their cosmology, than it is not possible to have a character break free of the Box and end up anywhere else other than still inside the Box. What I am not saying is that it is not possible to create a hierarchy where the Box as written is not its top element. Obviously it is possible to do so. It is possible to have things that are more abstract, paradoxical, more generic, more trivial, more conceptual, more fundamental, more complex, simpler, stranger, more unimaginable than the Box. Anything one wants really. All those properties can be used as a base to form some new valid and interesting classification worthy of thought and discussion any of those could have the Box anywhere along the hierarchy, including not at the top. Comparisons are not possible This should be obvious but it is impossible extrapolate from one hierarchy to another based on some different property. How two structures relate to each other on one hierarchy probably doesn't say anything about how they relate or should relate on another unrelated hierarchy. A note about containment Note that this could be called location instead of containment and still be valid. A cosmology does not need be hierarchically in the form of a single line. It could be a branching tree where, at an higher level there is no single path to go into but multiple parallel structures that exist without any space between them. In this case it would be possible to not have a single high level structure containing everything. I'm generalizing the word containment to include these possibilities. Maybe there exists a better word for it but I feel this one is sufficient and am not that interested in discussing semantics right now. The point stands despite that. If a better word appears in the meanwhile I will move to using it instead but this post will remain as is. Conclusion So, yes, it is possible to go beyond the Box. Just not in a hierarchy of containment. And it is my view that containment probably remains the most useful property to base a hierarchy on for purposes of world building. Category:Blog posts